Threads of Loss: Hair Work, Then and Now

Donna Lowson

Febuary 2026

 

Hair has returned to public view.

 

In recent months, it has appeared not only in museum cases and archival boxes such as the In Loving Memory Exhibition at Bankfield Museum in Halifax, but across fashion media and film publicity most visibly through renewed cultural attention around Wuthering Heights and the recreation of Charlotte Brontë’s mourning bracelet. This resurgence is welcome. It signals curiosity about nineteenth-century mourning practices and the intimate material languages through which grief was once held.

 

But as hairwork re-enters contemporary culture, is it admired for its strangeness, its shock value, rather than for the quiet, bodily connection that once defined it.

 

Historically, mourning jewellery made from hair was not simply decorative. It was slow, skilled, intimate work. Hair was selected, cleaned, sorted and woven by hand, often within domestic or informal economies. It carried the physical trace of a specific body, a mother, a child, a spouse, and functioned as a form of nearness at a time when death was woven into everyday life.

 

Importantly, the makers of these objects were rarely named. Women’s labour was absorbed into the object and then erased. What survives in museum collections are the finished pieces, severed from the hands that made them and the relationships they once held together.

 

Contemporary recreations of hairwork, including Charlotte Brontë’s recently recreated bracelet, bring valuable attention to these histories. Such projects demonstrate remarkable technical care and open conversations that might otherwise remain dormant. Visibility matters.

 

Yet when hair is replaced by thread, or hand processes translated through machine production, something subtle but significant shifts.

 

This is not an argument against reinterpretation. Materials evolve, and craft traditions have always adapted. But what is lost in that reinterpretation?

 

Hair behaves differently, ages differently, and carries a distinct relationship to the body. Historically, hair was used not for spectacle but for its connection and touch. It does not decay in the same way as flesh and remains recognisably of the person it came from. To hold hair close was to hold a trace of a loved one’s life.

 

Thread carries a diffrent weight.

 

The difference is not merely aesthetic, but relational. Hair must be handled, sorted, prepared and woven through sustained touch. It resists speed. It insists on contact. As scholar Heather Hind has argued in her work on hairwork and Wuthering Heights, the act of working hair is inseparable from touch itself, a material exchange in which maker and remembered body remain entangled. The object does not simply symbolise connection; it is produced through it.

 

When the material shifts, that relationship shifts too.

 

Much of the recent attention around mourning jewellery has emerged through celebrity culture, where unusual materials generate fascination and rapid circulation. Hair becomes intriguing because it feels uncanny, because it unsettles. In this context, shock becomes a form of visibility.

In this landscape, the recent recreation of Charlotte Brontë’s bracelet, where thread replaced hair, becomes part of that shift. When thread substitutes for hair, the object may echo the form, but it cannot replicate the bodily trace the original material carried. If the history is filtered primarily through strangeness, or through aesthetic revival alone, the relational intimacy that once gave the material its weight begins to thin.

 

Hairwork was never only about what an object looked like. It was about what it held: memory, proximity, and the endurance of touch across absence.

 

My own practice sits within this tension. Working with hair, alongside archival research and museum collaboration, I engage directly with the material’s demands. Hair requires care. It resists haste. It reminds the maker that they are handling part of someone’s body, and that process becomes one of attentiveness rather than production.

 

Central to my work is the recovery of overlooked makers. Many historic hair objects survive without attribution. The women who twisted, braided and enclosed strands together remain unnamed, their skill absorbed into the sentimental narrative of the object. To work with hair today is, in part, to honour that labour, to acknowledge hands historically unrecorded.

 

It is also to reclaim intimacy. Historically, hairwork was often relational rather than transactional. Pieces were made within families or close networks, embedding knowledge and memory in the act of making itself. Teaching these techniques today allows participants to work with their own family hair rather than commissioning an object. The material connection is not outsourced. It is enacted.

 

This active engagement allows history to speak not only through artefacts but through lived experience.

 

As hair re-enters contemporary consciousness, the question is not whether it should evolve. It always has. The question is how attentively we listen to the material itself, and to the histories embedded within it.

 

Visibility alone is not preservation. What matters is whether, in bringing hair work back into view, we also restore its relational and material depth: the touch, the connection, and the unnamed hands that first shaped it.